Get hot and steamy in the lap of luxury

On the Eastern and Oriental Express, it is certainly better to travel than to arrive, as Michael Williams explains

Thud! The banana flies across the room and lands with Cruise-like precision on my companion's shoulder. I vaguely remember what the novelist Spalding Gray said about Bangkok's night club performers, "doing everything" with a certain part of their anatomy "except have babies". But this does seem unduly athletic, given that we've merely refused to pay an extortionate price for a second Singha beer.

It's midnight, upstairs in one of the hundreds of clubs that line the streets of the Patpong area. Down below the stragglers in the night market are still haggling over fake Rolexes and Fendi bags. I'm here not to gawp at the pelvic floor exercises, but because of the curiosity of the Lady Novelist.

We're both staying, as it happens, at the Oriental Hotel, killing time before taking the Eastern and Oriental Express 1,260 miles south through Thailand and Malaysia to Singapore. The LN, who's "big" in chick-lit, I'm told, has set her latest work on the London-to-Venice Orient Express (typical romantic scene: "you lie on your back and let the motion of the train do the work") and is now researching the Far East via its even more exotic sister train. Me? After taking the local line through Vietnam from Hanoi to Saigon, I am keen to try out what this train's operators say is "the most exotic railway journey in the world".

The Oriental makes a suitably sybaritic starter. Joseph Conrad drank in the bar. Somerset Maugham caught malaria here. Nijinsky danced in the ballroom. Today, sashaying staff anticipate your every move. Outside my room, a white-suited butler waits to "serve my every need".

Certainly, literary junkies can join the Japanese tourists eating cucumber sandwiches in the "Authors' Lounge", although the LN is sniffy. Perhaps she is right. When I ask whether Graham Greene himself ever occupied the "Graham Greene suite" the receptionist says she hasn't a clue. And, oops ... heading the guest list of modern literary notables is a leering photo of Jeffrey Archer signing in (though it's not clear with whom).

Next morning, all polished teak and gleaming brass, under the British-built canopy of Hualamphong station, the E & O Express waits to bear us on our three-day trip through Malaysia to Singapore. The statistics are awesome: 22 carriages embellished with wooden marquetry, Chinese and Thai lacquer and upholstery finished by Parisian craftsmen. There are two restaurant cars, six Pullman cars, seven "state cars", a "presidential car", a library car and an observation car. As you board, you can almost hear the sound of champagne bubbles engaging with crystal.

But disappointingly for romantics (and bad news for the LN), there is not a single double bed on the train. There are other reality checks, too. The coaches, unlike their European counterparts, are not antiques from the Flapper era, but are stainless steel numbers, built for New Zealand Railways in the 1970s. Sadly, there is no steamy oriental equivalent of the Flying Scotsman on the front, but a humble (and rusting) Kawasaki diesel.

There is, however, some hissing from Evelyn, the efficient German train manager, which ensures that we pull out on the dot of 10.15. It may seem incongruous, sipping Pol Roger as you pass through the shanty suburbs of Bangkok, but nobody, inside or outside the train, seems to mind. Chai, my Thai steward, never stops smiling: "Which bunk you like, sir? Top for air-conditioning, bottom for ride?"

Bottom is best. I realise this four hours later as we clickety-clack down the rough, narrow-gauge track of the Thai-Burma Railway to the Bridge over the River Kwai (not the one you saw in the movie, which was a fake built in the Philippines). Not far from "River Kwai" station is the little British war cemetery, with its roll call of the hundreds of young men who died building the railway. "Stan," reads a typical inscription, "you will never be forgotten."

Train life is near perfect as we chug south. The jungle gets steamier as we pass into Malaysia and the encroaching foliage whips the side of the train. Four-course meals follow in close sequence. Elevenses, afternoon tea, and cocktails merge into a blur. For dinner we are asked to "dress" (ie: show off). Cigars and brandy are taken in the night air of the open observation car. Those inclined to nostalgia can sniff the wood smoke and timewarp themselves into Maugham's Malaya of the 1950s.

Is it always so genteel, I ask Kevin, the head chef and the train's longest-serving staff member, having been with it since the start nine years ago. Is there ever, well, any "hanky panky"? He tells of the drunken "expat boys" who got on at Singapore, climbed on to the roof and "were paraplegic" by the time the train had been under a couple of bridges. But compartment hopping? Kevin is guarded. "Put it this way, if a man's here with his secretary, we'll make sure it stays out of the publicity photos."

By the second evening, the Lady Novelist, whose creative powers are clearly straining at the leash, suggests a little game. You guess what your fellow passengers do in real life and score if you are right. Who, for instance, is "Manfred" who has a diamond in his ear and spends the journey simpering into his male companion's ear? We never find out. We're hopelessly wrong, too, about Martin, the Rowan Atkinson lookalike who turns out to be a Swiss TV weather forecaster from Zurich. But with the Jeffrey Archer clone from Surrey, we are spot on: he is an "internet security consultant" who has sold up and is using his millions to tour the world.

The "name game" helps us to survive the end of the train journey and the disappointment of disembarking in Singapore. There is little on this squeaky clean island to gainsay The Economist's description of it as "the most boring city in the world". I buy a fake designer watch in Bugis, Singapore's last remaining street market, once abolished because of the transvestites who hung out there and now re-created as a "hygienic area". But even spending £5 on an obviously counterfeit Patek Philippe makes me, one stallholder explains, an accessory to a crime. I stroll to the city's new waterfront concert hall and theatre complex, which boasts that it is the finest arts complex in all Asia. Undoubtedly so. But what price culture in a place where the censors even ban Sex and the City? Fortunately, at Raffles Hotel, despite its recent makeover, the superlatives are intact, with its ratio of two staff for every guest. And, even though they have moved the famous Long Bar to the back, you can still see why Maugham reckoned it contained "all the exotic fables of the east".

After a couple of Singapore Slings we try the name game on Xavier, Raffles' manager. It seems to misfire as he treats our tag of "gynaecologist" with immaculate disdain. Next day, though, delivered to my room is a lavish book on the hotel with the inscription: "To Michael. If you decide to answer the call of being an archaeologist (as you might be), Raffles could be the place to unearth legends." Touché.

"You know," says the Lady Novelist, "we seem to have taken a journey from vice to virtue. Don't you think it should have been the other way around?"

The Facts

Getting there

The Eastern & Oriental Express can be booked through Cox & Kings (020-7873 5000, www.coxandkings.co.uk). A nine-day trip costs from £2,225 per person, based on two sharing, including return flights on British Airways, two nights' b&b at Raffles Hotel in Singapore, two nights in a Pullman compartment on the Eastern & Oriental Express, guided tours, two nights at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, all meals on board the train, transfers and an excursion to the River Kwai bridge.